News

TU Delft earns second place in first autonomous drone race

The
MAV-lab team of students and researchers has become second in the first
ever autonomous drone race, which took place Wednesday Oct. 12 in
Daejeon, South Korea. Drone races are a new popular phenomenon.
Typically, human pilots compete with each other to finish first,
performing high-speed manoeuvres while flying challenging circuits. At
the IROS 2016 robotics conference in Daejeon, the stars of the show were
not human pilots, but the drones, since they had to fly a challenging
circuit all by themselves.

The members of the MAV-lab team that went to South Korea to participate in the autonomous drone race.

In the drone race, the drones had to pass many gates in a very
restricted space, and some extremely challenging gates, including a
ventilator. Finishing the track was considered too challenging for this
first race, so the team that came the furthest in the track with the
fastest time, was to win the competition. Many international teams
joined the competition, ranging from the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) to
KAIST (South Korea). After a nail-biting competition, both KAIST and TU
Delft past 10 gates – with KAIST being the fastest. So the final ranking
was:

For this first competition, the drones came nowhere near the speeds
of human FPV flyers. However, the performance of the teams showed that
robotic competition is underway.

Picture of the race track: the drones had to pass 26 gates in total,
with some gates arranged in spirals and even a gate with a
“ventilator”.

Autonomous drone races stimulate researchers to push the boundaries
of autonomous drone flight, and will have far-reaching implications for
real-world applications. For instance, high-speed flight will allow
drones to be much more efficient at helping human rescue workers in
search-and-rescue operations, and will be able to make much more
exciting imagery of extreme sports, also when these take place in narrow
environments such as in forests.

The MAV-lab used a Parrot Bebop for the competition, without
altering its hardware. The software was replaced by the Paparazzi
autopilot, co-developed by TU Delft. The MAV-lab used the smallest drone
in the competition, and was the only team to rely purely on monocular
vision.